Opinion

With a Whimper

Climate Bill Out With a Whimper

July 22, 2010

On Thursday, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, abandoned the fight for meaningful energy and climate legislation. The Republicans — surprise — had been fiercely obstructionist. But the Democratic leaders let them get away with it, as did the White House. It has been weeks since President Obama spoke out about the need for a serious climate bill to address the very real danger of global warming and to lessen this country’s dependence on imported oil.

Last year, the House passed a decent if imperfect bill that would have placed economywide caps on greenhouse gas emissions. John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman offered an equivalent bill in the Senate. Mr. Reid counted noses and decided his best chance was with a stripped-down version that caps only emissions from power plants. Now even that bill has fallen by the wayside.

Mr. Reid’s latest version is not even a pale shadow of what is needed. It will include useful reforms related to the oil spill, and possibly some land conservation and energy efficiency provisions. But there is no cap of any sort. Without that, industry will have little incentive to reduce emissions or invest in cleaner energy sources or new technologies. The bill also fails to require utilities to derive a significant percentage of their power from renewable sources.

The Republicans obviously bear a good part of the responsibility for this failure. With a handful of exceptions, they have denied or played down the problem of global warming for years and did pretty much anything they could to protect industry from necessary regulation. There are, however, as many as a dozen Senate Democrats, mainly from the South, Appalachia and the Midwest, who share the blame.

They cowered before the shrill warnings that capping carbon emissions — and making electricity from traditional fuels like coal more expensive — would cripple the economy. Never mind the wealth of evidence that the costs will be minimal and, over time, will be richly repaid in terms of new jobs and industries.

Mr. Obama never fully committed to the fight. He raised hopes here and around the world last year when he pledged in Copenhagen to reduce United States greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent. Until a couple of months ago, he talked a good game, praising the House bill that aimed at the 17 percent target and promising to make every effort to get the Senate to follow.

Then, despite the opportunity offered by the oil spill to press for a bold energy policy, the president essentially disappeared. What has passed for advocacy by the White House in recent days has consisted largely of one op-ed article by the energy adviser, Carol Browner, and daily assurances from the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, that the White House was “working behind the scenes.”

Can the country hope for better in the months ahead? It must. The danger of global warming is not going away just because Washington’s politicians don’t want to deal with it.

Even a scaled-down bill would be an important start. There is no secret about what it must include: a cap on power plant emissions, minimum standards for renewable energy, strong efficiency standards, new incentives for more fuel-efficient cars, investments and loan guarantees for next-generation technologies.

There is no chance unless Mr. Obama comes out fighting: calling out the Republicans, shaming and rallying Democratic laggards and explaining to the American people that global warming and oil dependency are clear and present threats to American security.